The first public review of my book! Thanks much Werner. I appreciated your comment: "the book which is a remarkably easy read." I also appreciate your criticisms, and would love to discuss in more detail with you some time in the future (in the hopes that would improve the 2nd edition -- assuming there is a 2nd edition ;).

James asks: So which is my blog? The beautiful painting or the objectionable, hateful symbol?

I must have not been clear: I think your blog is the beautiful picture! Some of your posts are clearly objectionable to some people, but that's part of art.

Blogging: The Accidental Literature



A very interesting logging entry caught my eye recently:

From James Snell (http://www.snellspace.com/blog/archives/000258.html)

hehe... well, apparently there are a couple of folks who would like me separate my personal political views from my thoughts on Web services. To answer that request, I've created a number of categories and corresponding home page views and RSS feeds.

The request James received really bothered me. Don’t misunderstand: I respect his decision to split his blog. I just feel that this request is, well, rude. I have no clue who made the request, and I’m sympathetic to it as well. I disagree with most of James’ political views. But, I enjoy hearing about his point of view.

After some thinking, what I realized why this bothered me. To illustrate, I’ll give you an analogy: imagine a painter painted a beautiful picture and hung it in a gallery. You had to enter the gallery to see the picture. But let’s imagine in one corner of this picture is a symbol that you find objectionable (or even hate). Would you feel comfortable asking the artist to modify the picture? I would posit that most people would not. Why?

There’s a concept of the artist integrity. The idea is that the artist decides how to compose his piece of work. It’s general considered bad form to request an artist (at least for non-commissioned works) change his artwork. The consumers of the artwork get to either view it whole, or not view it.

My point? Blogging is a new form of literature. I don’t think this was intentional. You could argue even that not all blogs are literature. But, I would argue that nearly all personal blogs (like James’) are a journal-like piece of literature.

My contention is that my blog is a work of art, and so is James’. So is yours. It’s an accident. I don’t think it was intended to. But, I think it is. That means all of us blog authors deserve the respect and customs usually accorded to artists and writers.

This may sound hoity-toity, but I think it’s true. Even more so, when blogs interact with each other, you find an almost community piece of literature is built.

I don’t think I’ve entirely made my argument in this entry. I’ll try to add more later. In the meantime, I’ve extremely interested in what others have to say.

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace ThreadStuff
{
	class Class1
	{
		[DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet=CharSet.Auto)]
		public extern static int GetCurrentThreadId();

		[STAThread]
		static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			Console.WriteLine("Begin Main(clr): " +  System.AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("Begin Main(win32): " + Class1.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("Begin Main(hash): " + Thread.CurrentThread.GetHashCode().ToString() );
			Foo foo = new Foo();
			ThreadStart threadStart = new ThreadStart( foo.Bar );
			Thread thread = new Thread(threadStart);
			thread.Start();
			Console.WriteLine("End Main(clr): " + System.AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("End Main(win32): " + Class1.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("End Main(hash): " + Thread.CurrentThread.GetHashCode().ToString() );
			Console.ReadLine();
		}
	}

	public class Foo
	{
		public void Bar()
		{
			Console.WriteLine("Bar(clr):" +  System.AppDomain.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("Bar(win32): " + Class1.GetCurrentThreadId().ToString() );
			Console.WriteLine("Bar(hash): " + Thread.CurrentThread.GetHashCode().ToString() );
		}
	}
}

“Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”

From: Why Nerds are Unpopular.

How come we aren't seeing any indie-style reality shows? There are tons of movies made for very little money (or even nothing). It seems like the concepts of reality shows are just begging to be co-opted by guerilla filmmakers. They would be tremendously successful as well. Think about it: these shows would have show less of a difference in production values to their high-cost brethren.

The more I think about this, the more I'm thinking I'd like to do this. Maybe a reality show about a geek (a Star Trek-lovin', Slahdot-readin', XBox-playin' true-blue geek) looking for love - or maybe just a good job. What do you think?

Geeks Without Borders. I can't wait until kind of thing gets tied into blogging.

Floor speech by Senator Robert Byrd. A brilliant articulation of how I feel.

My gamertag for XBox live is Commoner. Let's play.

Interesting post by Joshua. I often wonder if anyone gets anything out of my blog. I post sparsely, am rarely vituperative, and the technical content is less than useful on most occasions. That said, I blog for myself mostly, and to engage others in conversation. I would classify this blog as 50% personal whatevers and 50% technical interesting content.

Here's a link to something I find personal interesting. My second favorite movie of all time is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The filibuster scene is absolutely inspiring. The senate is the most exclusive club in the world. It behooves us all to understand how they operate. I love that a minority who believes strongly can prevent something from happening.

Here's a link (note: this is a PDF) to something I find technically fascinating and contributed to.

My book ships tomorrow. I need to keep errata, code snippets, etc on this site. So, I've decided to start a blog. :-)

http://www.keithba.net/book/ is the URL.

Simon has a new look. Not sure if I like it yet. I'm a purist and love white (or lighter colored) backgrounds and dark lettering. But, change is good!

Also in the cool new things from Simon department is an RSS feed for my Read, See, Hear blog. Thanks Simon!

God's own type system.

FWIW, I said that XSD was the type system handed down by God, not his own type system. I'm sure God uses set theory for his own work.